Social networking has become an important part of modern life. In both pleasure and business applications, social networking enables people to meet other people with mutual interests. There are numerous social networking websites where users build profiles that help to describe their interests, as well as allowing the users to describe or elaborate the types of relationships they are looking to build. In order to facilitate interpersonal discovery, social networks can link people together through mutual connections, such as suggesting a connection based on one party being a “friend of a friend” of the other, or another relationship between the two potential connections.
Such a network of person-to-person relationships forms the foundation of what are generally referred to as social networks. However, the mapping of individual relationships is far more complex than simply connecting two individuals based on a common interest. Imagine, for example, social network participants as nodes on a graph, with the number of segments (intermediate participants) needed to link one participant to another representing the degrees of separation between those two participants. Profile information that the social network can be configured to store for each user is often used to build a web of potential contacts beyond the first degree of separation for users. The social network provider can also create a social network (a list of contacts) for a user by tracking user-to-user communication, pursing user created contact lists or address books, or allowing users to explicitly create their own networks.
Furthermore, participants in a social network can often establish an affiliation with one or more specific groups (clubs, working groups, professional associations, etc.), which can have a separate group profile to convey information about the group, such as the purpose or charter of the group. In particular, in addition to sharing affiliation in the group (e.g., sharing similar interests, businesses, organizations, etc.), members of a group can access the otherwise closed profiles of other members of that same group based on group policies. Typically, affiliation with a particular group occurs on an individual participant basis.
In the realm of friendships, people often seek out other people with similar interests, such as music, sports, or art. In some cases, people seek someone with a certain character trait or skill set for a specific purpose, even if it is a trait the seeker does not necessarily share. For example, a piano player might look for a bass player in order to form a band. In the realm of business, a mixture of common and complementary factors is often important. For example, an entrepreneur might simultaneously seek out a software developer, an investor, and an attorney in order to construct a well-rounded team for a certain project. Furthermore, the entrepreneur might stipulate that all of the persons sought share a common interest (e.g. cloud computing) in addition to the individuals' different, complementary skill sets. In these and numerous other scenarios, social networking represents a powerful tool for allowing the interested parties to find each other. Social networks can also provide mechanisms for tracking online reputations, and can help various interconnected users estimate how much to trust one another, especially when the users have not interacted previously in person. By making the introduction process more efficient, professional and personal relationships are improved. And although many introductions and relationships can be started between participants online, there is still no substitute for a certain level of in-person interaction.